The Definitive Social Media Guide for Technologically Illiterate Beauty Professionals

Time is precious. Don’t waste more of itthan you have to managing social media.

Not everyone is computer literate, so the vast majority of articles written on the subject of social media don’t really help them at all. You guys have enough to worry about without having to spend hours trying to figure out how social media works and how to manage it. So I’m going to help you. Step by painstaking step…with pictures!First of all, social networking is not complicated. You definitely don’t want to pay a company to do these things for you. They are simple to do yourself. You just have to set up a comprehensive system for managing your social profiles so that doing so is easy and quick. I’m going to show you how to do that right now. Buckle in.

We’ll go through all the major social media platforms, including Facebook (pages and groups), Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Pinterest, Flickr, Google+, FourSquare, LinkedIn, and Yelp. This first step I’m going to share with you will help make managing all of your profiles across all of these sites easier.

Click the three line button thing to access the Settings.

Download Google Chrome. Chrome is a web browser (like Internet Explorer but much, much better).Make a Gmail account. This email account is specifically for managing your social media accounts. When you create your accounts on various social media sites, this is the address you’ll use.

Scroll down and make sure both of these boxes are checked.

Once you’ve launched Chrome and set up your email address, click the Customize & Control Google Chrome button (that wonky three lined button in the upper right hand corner). When your settings menu comes up, scroll to the bottom to where it says “Passwords and forms. Make sure both “Enable Autofill” and “Offer to save passwords” are checked. This will make it so that Chrome saves your passwords and automatically signs you in to sites that it has saved account information for. Definitely comes in handy when you have multiple social media accounts.

Have some great pictures taken. You can find amateur photographers on ModelMayhem by clicking the link. Pictures don’t have to cost you a fortune. Some photographers will be willing to barter with you for services. Ask around, make some contacts! Get some great images of your salon, your staff, and maybe a few portfolio shots of your work as well. Save them in a folder with your business name on your desktop. Whenever you need to upload images to any of the sites you join, they’ll be easy to access.

Step 1.

Step 2.

Schedule “Social Media Update” Time. Set a specific day and time each week that you will sit down and manage your social media presence. If you want to do this every day, that’s even better.

Program your Google Chrome to automatically open your social network profiles as soon as you open the browser. To do this, click the three line button to access the Settings menu again. Scroll down to where it says, “On Startup” and select the option, “Open a specific page or set of pages.” Then click, “Set pages.” This will open up the “Startup pages” menu you see to the left. In the “Add a new page” box, type in the URL to your social media sites. (I’ve added Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger as an example.) When you’re done, select “Ok.” From now on, when you open Chrome, each site you specified will open up in its own tab. I go through each tab one at a time. I check for updates, update my pages myself, respond to messages, and then close the tab

Beauty industry survivalist, salon crisis interventionist, tactical verb-weapon specialist, and the leader of at least a hundred workplace revolutions, Tina Alberino is known as much for her extensive knowledge as for her sarcastic wit and mercilessly straightforward style. She’s the author of the book The Beauty Industry Survival Guide and the blog This Ugly Beauty Business. When she’s not writing, educating, or consulting, she can be found overthinking everything, identifying problems people didn’t know existed, and stubbornly working to change the things she cannot accept.